UK Financial Regulator Builds Blockchain App on R3's Corda

The U.K.'s chief financial markets regulator has helped develop a new app using blockchain consortium R3's Corda distributed ledger platform.

Announced today, the prototype – focused on the reporting of mortgage transactions – was revealed to have been built with input from the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and another unnamed banking institution. The app allows regulators to see real-time updates, with receipts being created for mortgage transactions as they are conducted.

That the FCA would be interested in technology that could enhance its oversight is perhaps unsurprising. To date, the FCA has welcomed a number of startups into its regulatory "sandbox," which allows for the testing of financial products and services in a limited setting.

Last year, FCA director of strategy Chris Woodward said that blockchain was one technology that the agency was considering for possible applications.

"[This area] is an opportunity for us to understand how we can best support developments and potentially adopt some RegTech solutions ourselves," he said at the time.

Indeed, the FCA has gone as far as saying publicly that it wants to give breathing room to startups working with financial technologies, including blockchain. In April, the authority announced that it saw no need – at least for now – to adjust its rules to account for the tech.

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